The portfolio of a gamer, programmer, and musician.

Raspberry PI Ambilight

I had a second Raspberry PI collecting dust at home with which I didn’t really know what to do. Well… After some browsing I came across a pretty thing called Ambilight!

Upon digging through some websites I found out that this is actually a something originally created by Philips which creates a mood light on the back of your TV based on what is on screen.

But enough babbling. I started this project with the help of this Instructable (and later with this one). This link includes the list of all the materials you have to buy to get your own Raspberry PI driven Ambilight to work with pretty much any HDMI input you feed it!

I started by cutting the LED strips and sticking them to the back of my TV. After some hours of (infuriating) soldering, all the LED strips were well connected from end to end. Make sure to use the continuity function of your multimeter, because it is really, really useful.

Afterwards, since I didn’t really have any bit of code to test whether the strips were working fine, I used my old mbed LPC1768 with this library to drive some test colours. All I had to do was to make sure I defined the correct number of LEDs (71 in my case) in one of the constants and presto! I had rainbow colours all over the place!

The final bit was to just follow the first Instructable link I posted here, buying all the pieces that I was missing, and attaching my Wii U to the HDMI input of the whole thing. As you can see from the demo video above, it works pretty well!